Somewhere in the Levant, roughly 100,000 years ago, someone buried a person they loved. They placed red ochre on the body. They laid marine shells nearby. Then they walked away — and came back in their dreams. This paper begins there, because everything begins there. Not with the first temple, or the first written prayer, or the first named god. With grief. With the refusal to accept that the people we love simply stop existing. That refusal, and the behavioral logic it generated across tens of thousands of years, is the cognitive origin of religious belief — and, this paper argues, of civilization itself. Drawing on archaeological evidence spanning 176,000 years, the neuroscience of REM dreaming, cross-cultural patterns of ancestor veneration, and the documented emergence of pantheons through regional deity synthesis, the argument is made that religion was never invented. It was generated — continuously, universally, and inevitably — from the same cognitive hardware operating under the same existential conditions across every culture that has ever existed. Religion did not slow civilization. It made civilization thinkable. Without the symbolic cohesion it provided, the cooperative structures required to build cities, legal systems, and lasting institutions would have had no carrier. This is not a defense of any specific tradition, nor a critique of any. It is a recognition that all traditions share a common origin in the most human experience there is: the love of the dead, and the dream of their return.
ANTHONY VONDOOM (Tue,) studied this question.